Ruth laughed but was pleased by her mother’s spirit.
The men returned, sheepishly delivering eight lumpy, straw-filled mattresses. “There are only six cots,” Frank said, “but we made two extra mattresses. Ralph and I can sleep on the floor and the kids can share a cot.”
“Tomorrow we will build some chairs and table,” Taizo said. “We can make the necessary tools from scrap metal.”
They further divided the two rooms with bed sheets hung from the rafters. Jiro insisted that Taizo, Etsuko, and the Haradas occupy the front room. “The children need fresh air. We will make do in back.”
By this time they were all starving—the last food they’d eaten were the sandwiches Helen Russell had made for their train trip. Mess Hall 5 was closest to them; they arrived to find at least a hundred people standing in two lines. The Watanabes waited for the better part of an hour to get inside, where the line then inched and squiggled between steam counters and scores of internees eating at picnic tables. At the head of the serving counter, there were stacks of plates and bins of silverware—no chopsticks.
It was Etsuko’s turn to feel shame. All these people holding out their plates for food—it reminded her of the breadlines during the Depression, vagabonds begging in soup kitchens. Now she was holding out a plate—homeless, like many on those breadlines—and she couldn’t help but feel as if she, too, were begging. Her shame and embarrassment was almost greater than her hunger; she nearly walked away, preferring to starve. But when she reached the first steam counter she fought back her pride and held up her plate, her hands trembling. A cook reached into the metal pan, took out a plain boiled potato with his fingers, and put it on her plate. The second man also used his fingers, picking up two Vienna sausages and dropping them next to the potato. The third used a ladle, at least, to scoop up a wad of yellowish-green spinach, and a girl at the end of the counter gave her two pieces of sliced bread. Etsuko looked at her plate in dismay: She had debased herself, and for what? Canned sausage and overcooked vegetables?
“No rice?” Taizo asked the last of the cooks.
The man shook his head. “Not today. Maybe later this week.”
The family found a table and sat down to desultorily eat their supper. “What is this?” Donnie asked, poking a sausage with his fork.
“It’s just a hot dog without a bun, silly!” Ruth improvised. This changed everything, and he attacked the sausages with gusto. The same could not be said for the rest of the family. Nor did the mess hall lend itself to relaxing dining: it echoed with the clatter of dishes, the clangor of pots and pans colliding in the kitchen, and the cacophony of hundreds of people conversing all at once.
Frank went away for a few minutes to speak with one of the cooks, and when he returned he said, “The kitchen staff is overwhelmed preparing three meals a day for eight thousand people; they need all the help they can get. Tomorrow I’ll apply for a job; maybe I can even help improve the fare.”
By the time they finished dinner it was dark out and a chill, cutting wind flung dirt into their faces. There was no outdoor lighting, so they stumbled blindly over tree roots, felt the sting of eucalyptus branches, and walked into a webwork of clotheslines strung between barracks. Finally they reached Barrack 9, stepped inside, and immediately breathed in the stench. The atmosphere was poisonous, but it was too cold to open the windows. So they turned on the single light in each apartment, Ruth got the children into pajamas, and the adults prepared for bed as well. Donnie sat on his prickly bed of straw and said what everybody was thinking:
“Mama, I want to go home.”
Ruth’s heart ached. She couldn’t find the words.
“Please, Mama, let’s go home,” he said plaintively, and began to cry.
Peggy echoed, “Home, Mama,” and also started to cry.
Frank lifted her up and rocked her, saying “Shh, shh, it’s all right, baby. It’s all right…”
Ruth took Donnie in her arms. “We—we can’t go home yet, honey. We have to stay here for a while. But remember the fun we had today? Watching the baseball game? And that big track—you can run all the way around it tomorrow, if you want! Will you do that? Show Mama how fast you can run?”
“Okay,” Donnie said uncertainly, sniffing back tears.
“Good boy.” She tucked him into bed, his sister next to him, covered by the same Army blanket. She kissed them both on their foreheads. “G’night.”
Frank bent down and kissed them too. “We love you, babies.”
“I’m not a baby,” Donnie said, pride trouncing sorrow.
Taizo and Jiro turned off the lights. There was no heat in the stall, and they all shivered under thin blankets as the wind gusted through cracks in the thin walls. The combination of manure and the sickly-sweet smell of hay made them all want to gag. Almost as bad, there was no privacy, no quiet. Through that foot of open space between the ceiling and the top of the partitions, the Watanabes could hear their neighbors’ snores, the chattering of teeth in the cold, the colic of babies … but most unnervingly, they heard weeping. The weeping of grown men and women, cries of hopelessness and loss, separation and misery. And in that collective lament, Ruth heard one closer by, muted in its shame: the sound of her own father’s sobs, shocking in its newness, his familiar strength and solidity, like a once-sturdy oak, now riven with such grief and despair that it broke his daughter’s heart.
* * *
They finally fell asleep, only to discover during the night that they shared their quarters with other tenants: tiny horse fleas with a vicious bite, flies drawn to the manure under the floor, mice that could be heard scuttling from room to room in the dead of night. Ralph and Frank quickly came to regret their decision to sleep on the floor. By morning the family was covered with flea bites and grumpy from what felt like sleeping on cacti. Ruth took the kids into the ladies’ latrine to brush their teeth; others were doing the same as water streamed from the spigots down the length of the trough. One woman spat out a gob of tooth powder and Ruth watched in horror as a chalky tendril of saliva came floating downstream past her.
Oh my God, she thought. Are we really expected to live like this?
After breakfast Etsuko and Nishi began mopping the floors and scrubbing the walls with Ajax cleanser as the men went foraging for scraps of metal and lumber. Ruth wanted to help but all she could do was get the kids out of the way long enough for the apartments to be whipped into something fit for human habitation. She could at least return the borrowed brooms to their neighbor, and when Shizuko came to the door she invited Ruth and the children in for tea made on their little hot plate. Ruth was pleasantly surprised by their apartment, which was cheerfully covered in linoleum liberated from the bar at the former Tanforan Clubhouse and furnished with attractive handmade furniture—chairs, table, benches, shelves, closets—as well as a radio and a phonograph. The Dutch stable doors had been taken down and replaced with a curtain separating the two rooms; colorful maps, painted scarves, and college banners adorned the walls.
Shizuko introduced Ruth, Peggy, and Donnie to her husband, Nakajiro, and her daughters and sons, including Charles, an affable graduate student the same age as Ruth. “Welcome to the neighh-borhood,” he said with a laugh. “Say, this just came out, you might find it useful.” He gave her the latest issue of the camp newsletter, the Tanforan Totalizer, for which Charles was a staff writer. One of the headlines announced MEMORIAL DAY SERVICE SET.
“I have nothing against Memorial Day,” Ruth said, “but isn’t this a little … paradoxical? Saluting the flag as we’re surrounded by barbed wire?”
“I understand how you feel. But we have to show we’re loyal Americans. We have to be better than the way they’re treating us.”